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Micree Zhan, the Man Behind Bitmain, Beats Jihan Wu in Shareholding

As the world’s largest mining chip producer, Bitmain draw much attention of the crypto mining insiders. Its co-funder and co-CEO Jihan Wu also becomes an international figure who had influence on the world crypto stage. However, there is anther man, owns a much bigger stake in Bitmain than Wu does.

Micree Zhan, another co-funder and co-CEO of Bitmain owns 36.5% of the company while Wu owns 20.5% of Bitmain’s stake, according to a leaked pre-ICO investor decks. It was also disclosed that Bitmain is aiming to achieve a $14 billion market cap once it goes public, and by then, according to the stake percentage they owned, Zhan’s stake would woth at least $5.1 billion while Wu’s stake worth nearly $2.9 billion.

According to Forbes, Zhan’s net worth is also much higher than Wu at around $4 billion while Wu’s siting at $2.3 billion.

Zhan majored in electrical engineering at Shandong University in 2001, after that, he completed his master degree in engineering at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Microelectronics in 2004.

His career in engineering leads him to dig deeply in the integrated circuit design, and enables him to develop the application-specific integrated (ASIC) chips that have propelled the world-wide growth of Bitmain later on.

In 2013, Wu met up with Zhan and spent two hours to discuss their views on bitcoin and Wu brought up the idea to starting a chip company. Zhan listened intently and thought carefully. According to Bloomberg, Zhan spent two hours learning more about cryptocurrencies on Wikipedia afterwards. On the next day, Zhan agreed to join the venture.

Nowadays, both Zhan and Wu’s efforts have brought Bitmain up to the largest crypto mining hard ware manufacturer in the world, its market share is 3 to 5 times higher than its most prominent competitions Canaan. The Bitmain-based mining pools collectively accounting for nearly 50% of all bitcoin mining power and its ASIC dominance may continue after its IPO.